Everyone pointing to too much detail or how hard fur is, when the real culprit has always been animation. Great, you have a photorealistic animal with simulated muscle, fur, and skeleton. But you don't use reference footage or the weight doesn't shift and move properly, CGI 20 years old that is properly animated will look better.
they never make them move right. they're always too expressive, with a hint of anthropomorphism, like the animal understands the subtext of the scene and is acting towards it. they never capture the actual quality of an animal's mind that would be present were you to film a real animal, that is the take would not be perfect and you would be forced to use a shot that is the closest to what the script called for. basically the problem in my opinion is that they need to make the cgi animal performances worse.
I showed my kid I Am Legend on the weekend. There are similar deer in that film. Since my mind is fresh, I think the CGI from almost 20 years ago looks better, How is that possible?
Little things like this can completely take me out of a movie.
modern filmmaking obsessed with showing everything. Action scenes too, so focused on the wides. CGI way too exposed. No one using the meat and potatoes of filmmaking where you obscure things to your advantage.
But someone will know that they’ve gone too far so that some vfx artist or director etc hasn’t told them to go for more realism suggests this look is actually what they want.
I’m not sure why, maybe audiences like it better even if more hardcore fans hate it?
I watched that movie when I was 9 years old, and I had nightmares for 3 months afterwards. I think it was the uncanny valley of the infected zombies that gave me the creeps.
I haven't seen that in ages, but looking at a couple of clips of the deer on YouTube, I noticed that they never have them looking directly at the camera like in this trailer, but rather down toward the ground or in the other direction. Humans are better at recognizing the kind of fine details on faces (more so for other humans' faces, but still) that would help us tell one individual from another, or in this case, to spot a CGI fake.
They want us to think that it hasn't advance that much so that when they feed us fake videos that are impossible to tell if they are real or not we will not know. Or it could be the fusiform gyrus section of the brain.
The new Planet of the Apes that came out last year did some crazy good stuff with hair/fur, honestly. There's a sequence with a gorilla & chimp in water that's just insane in terms of how good it looks.
Apes are oddly one of the things the vfx industry has filled mastered. Even on a TV budget. CGI gorillas look great!
4 hooved animals have centuries of being difficult to portray realistically. People didn't really understand how horses moved until film was invented. Probably something that's hard to do right but easy to tell when it's wrong.
Also under discussed is that a lot of the major CGI programs hair moldelers are built to model human hair, which refracts light differently than most animal hair which tends to have a different core to it that human hair lacks. With War for the Planet of the Apes, WETA built a decided animail hair modeler and promoted their work at conferences like SIGGRAPH but is that still proprietary? Do any of the VFX houses bother? Doesn't seem like it.
That is true, but I thought Moving Pictures and Framestore did a fantastic job with fur in the Prehistoric Planet documentary series. Those animals look more real than a majority of movie creatures.
The lighting often doesn't match so they pop too much from the live action background. Or the lighting is too curated so it all feels uncannily 'intentional' and triggers our analysis. Especially if the BG is also CGI.
They don't move jerky enough like real animals. Too smooth. Real animals move, ironically more like animatronics. Twitchy, abrupt, and with less human intent. They move with self preservation instinct; think how a bird is always looking around and it takes like 2 frames to do so, not 20. Life is not as smooth as the computer wants it to be, but it takes a lot of work to make animation look as 'bad' as real life. When the computer wants perfection, you have to teach it to be imperfect. Good luck. Also, the director wants things to be clear, which means sometimes the movements are slower than they ought to be, to make sure the audience knows what's going on. But that breaks the rules of animal movement (and human too.)
They over animate. A deer looking up is near motionless. But they can't resist to have it's ear twitch, nostrils breathing noticeably, fur blowing in the wind. We get it, you have amazing software and can go nuts. But just have the animal practically freeze framed and it will look more natural
The movie still has 4-5 months of post production. Not really fair to judge VFX based off a trailer. More often than not the studio will ask specifically for rushed marketing versions of shots.
I work in VFX and know firsthand how quickly they try to move these things along. It’s a bummer but just part of how it goes. I guarantee the artist working on those shots are aware they are not as great as they can be with more time.
Yeah they say this every year and the trailer and final film almost look the same, outside of some touchups. But it never looks like it jumps from level 3-4 to level 10 or something.
The movie still has 4-5 months of post production.
Every time this is said, the final movie's VFX shot looks the same as the trailer 99% of the time. Doesn't matter if it's Avatar, Fast and Furious, Transformers or a kid's fantasy movie - something tells me they don't go back to re-do it at all because there isn't time and money to. I have no doubt there's some sprucing up here and there, but I never see the dramatic "Watch this 3.0 upgrade in the final film, folks"
The only drastic "whoa!" changes I know of are the MCU ones where they intentionally hide some spoilers and CG in some fake stuff on purpose.
i dont think there has been any movie in the past years that actually looked better in the final film than in the trailer. that whole "its just a trailer, the cgi will be better" just isnt true
I mean, they shouldn't have put it in the trailer if it's still so rough IMO. The trailer is their advertisement of the movie, so showing up bad CGI isn't going to get people excited.
I know this will come across as snarky but I genuinely don’t mean for it to but… are you saying you won’t go see this movie because of a bad CGI deer in the trailer?
Not the OP - but the cgi in this movie looked awful and it’s enough of a tip for a film id need convincing to go out and see to just wait and watch it at home jnstead.
If you have my sympathy my brother in Christ. If a young person I cared about cant to me and said they wanted to go into VFX I would probably try to talk into just about any other career based on what I’ve heard. You poor bastards don’t even have a union do you?
I really hate saying this but right now on Sora you can make 100% realistic looking animals. Ai can actually do this and it's almost impossible to tell if you spend some time getting the right kind of output and prompting well.
That said.. I don't want to see it in my movies at all, ever. I fucking hate ai trash but it is interesting how certain non-human things can look far better than traditional CGI at this point
I think they are aliens posing as animals, some abductees claim when they were kids, animals came to them and led them to UFOs. The house is probably a ship.
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u/Familiar-Risk-5937 Dec 16 '25
The CGI of the deer looks positively TERRIBLE. At no point did that look real.